Category Archives: Travel

John Fund has a piece in a recent issue of The American on how under-appreciated Switzerland has become the envy of Europe. It’s good fodder for those of us who love Switzerland.

The country is consistently at the top of quality of life rankings. Its people are among the most productive in the world. Its culture is fascinating (four official languages!). And as Fund emphasizes, its smart economic policies have led to a high level of prosperity and innovation.

The summer after my junior year of high school I left America for the first time to participate in a student-exchange program in Zurich. That trip opened my eyes to international travel…and the rest is history.

I’m excited to be going back to Switzerland in less than a month. I’ll be in St. Gallen for a week, as I was a winner in the St. Gallen Symposium essay contest. Then I’ll be in Zurich for a few days visiting friends, and then Massimo and I will go to Prague for a few days. Drop me an email if you live in any of these three cities and want to meet up, or if you have tips on Prague.

Last week was one of the worst in US air travel history with over 100,000 passengers affected by the cancellation of over 3,000 American Airlines flights, various airline bankruptcies, and tornadoes in the midwest. This post has the story of my own travel hell last week, followed by a handful of links to interesting articles and posts on air travel.

On Thursday, I attempted to fly from Kearney, Nebraska, where I gave a speech, to Ontario, California, which is 15 minutes away from Claremont, on Great Lakes Airlines which serves a bunch of small towns in the midwest by flying from the small town (like Kearney) to Denver airport, a United and Frontier Airlines hub.

I was on a 7am flight out of Kearney to Denver. It started with the airport. One-gate, small airports present unique challenges. Thanks to the new TSA regulations which don’t allow you to bring water through the security checkpoint, most of us water-guzzlers-to-the-point-of-being-almost-diabetic have to buy new water bottles after security. Really small airports, however, don’t usually have stores after security. Nor bathrooms. Nor food. So you better pray to Jesus that you take off soon after clearing security, or else you’ll be waiting with a parched throat and bloated gladder.

After clearing security, we waited to board. 15 minutes later the gate agent comes over and tells us that poor weather in Denver means we’re not taking off. The agent makes it clear that if we choose to leave secure area and reenter the more spacious lobby where there’s a vending machine of drinks and many-year-old bags of chips, we will (emphasis his) have to go through security again. (photo credit)

I leave the secure area, buy water, start reading. Our delay is indefinite, we are given no ETD. One guy decides he’s had enough already (it’s only 7:30 AM!), and rents a car to drive to Denver Airport, five hours away by car. Most of us laugh at him. He looks at us, rental car keys in hand. He says nothing. His eyes say: you sorry looking sons-of-bitches. He leaves. Naturally, he turned out to be the smart one.

Weather delays are not uncommon. From Kearney you can only fly to Denver (one hour flight) on a small, regional jet that has propellers. Smaller jets require good weather to land safely. The midwest has some sketchy weather. Hence, small jets often get hosed by weather that doesn’t affect large planes.

About an hour and a half later the agent announces that Denver weather has improved and we’ll be taking off. Ha, I say to myself, we’ll beat the rental car guy by at least four hours. We go back through security checkpoint. Then the agent announces that we must wait for the plane to be fueled. Then they open the terminal door and let us loose. To board, you must fast-walk across on the tarmac, climb the stairs, and crouch into the plane. The rain was really coming down, and the stairs into the plane were rickety, so the gate agent advised us, "One at a time." When I ran across the tarmac, braving Mother Nature, I felt like Hillary Clinton running across the tarmac in Bosnia.

An hour later, in the air, we approached Denver airport. And approached. And approached. 20 minutes after the pilot announced an imminent landing, I turned to the guy sitting behind me. "We’re not, ahem, circling are we?" I didn’t want to hear the answer. I knew what we were doing. It made me sick. We circled for a full hour. Pilot comes on: "Guys, weather has deteriorated, we’re going to Pueblo." Huh? Pueblo? The flight attendant comes by each of our seats and explains we’re going to land in Pueblo, Colorado, re-fuel, and then try Denver again. We land in Pueblo 20 minutes later. We sit on the runway for 30 minutes. We don’t de-plane because we want to be prepared to take off again for Denver the moment conditions improve.

People are getting anxious. It’s stuffy. The lavatory is almost full, the flight attendant announces, and Pubelo airport (where we were) doesn’t have the capability to "service it." Someone says, "Let us off!" I yell out, "Is there a restaurant in there?" The attendant consults with the pilot and they decide to let passengers off but not our checked luggage.

I suppose we fared better than the more famous incidents of people spending more than nine hours in the plane on a runway. Every time I read these stories it always amazes me that the passengers don’t punch out the flight attendant and barge open the door. I mean, nine hours on a runway – are you fucking kidding me?

We wait around the Pueblo airport hoping for a good word on Denver weather. I do two sets of 20 push-ups. I must admit, in my ceaseless quest for the silver lining in shitty situations, the camaraderie that emerges among fellow stranded passengers is always good fun. Taking turns sharing our stories. Trying to one-up each other in the horrible, horrible consequences of our delays. Calling our loved ones after we hear the latest update, "No, honey, I’m in Pueblo. Yes, it’s been four hours. No, I haven’t left yet. No, I’m not joking." Common goals bring together uncommon people.

Yes! Better Denver weather! We have to go back through TSA security. The agent puts every other person through extra screening, which is ridiculous. She’s acting as if she hasn’t had anything to do for at least 24 hours. Half the group, from another re-directed plane, gets back on their plane. About to take off. They don’t move. The other half of us sit in the post-security lounge – no water, no bathroom, no food – and watch the idle plane. They don’t move. 20 minutes. 30 minutes. 40 minutes. Finally, they deplane again. They’re pissed.

The agent announces that it’s not Denver weather, now, but Pueblo weather. High winds. Can’t take off. "Christ," I say, "Who wants to rent a car?" Enough with air travel. I’m too young to rent a car, so I needed to find a willing co-conspirator. People swarm the Hertz desk. I’m third in line. Hertz runs out of cars after the second person in line. Shit. We partner up. We fight with the flight agents to get our luggage off the plane. We fight. We fight. Get the luggage. We start the 3 hour drive to Denver airport. (Several people decided to stay in Pueblo and wait it out.)

In the car, I call United and move my flight back to the 6:00 PM flight to ONT (originally I was on the 9:30 AM). My fellow passengers race to the airport and drop me off curbside. I arrive at DEN at 5:20 PM. I raced through security and made the flight, which was delayed but full (lesson: call the airline and get on a later flight if you’re flight is delayed, even if you’re in an airport because desk counters can have long lines).

I arrive at Ontario some 14 hours later than expected. As we taxi on the Ontario airport, the cabin is basically quiet. Then a guy two rows back says in a loud, thuggish voice, These seats are so uncomfortable. Everyone kind of ignores him awkwardly. He says to no one in particular, Seriously – this is like sitting on bleachers. I felt like turning back and telling him to quit his bitchin’, that I had been up for 19 hours trying to move a mere 1,200 miles. I said nothing. It was 70 degrees at night in Southern California. And my throat was parched.

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Here are some interesting links on flying:

• James Fallows has an interesting article in the latest Atlantic about air-taxis. This might be the future for short haul flights if firms like DayJet figure out a business model that makes it affordable for the masses. I hope they expand to California next — there’s a huge opportunity to compete with United Express on all the puddle jumper flights throughout the big state.
• The Economist has launched a new travel blog called Gulliver.
• Patrick Smith on why, despite all the problems with airline travel today, we should still be grateful. US commercial aviation is the safest modest of transport in the world; prices are cheaper than they were 20 years ago; route maps are as dense as they’ve ever been.
• Jeff Jarvis asks, "What if a plane flight were networked and became a social experience with its own economy?" He then proposes The Social Flight.

David Sedaris is hilarious. In his New Yorker essay last December on airline travel, he makes a couple really funny and good points.

Here he’s dead-on about how we learn how we’re supposed to grieve from pop culture:

… I thought back to when I was fifteen and a girl in my junior high died of leukemia, or “ ‘Love Story’ disease,” as it was often referred to then. The principal made the announcement and I, along with the rest of my friends, fell into a great show of mourning. Group hugs, bouquets laid near the flagpole. I can’t imagine what it would have been like had we actually known her. Not to brag, but I think I took it hardest of all. “Why her and not me?” I wailed.

“Funny,” my mother would say, “but I don’t remember you ever mentioning anyone named Monica.”

My friends were a lot more understanding, especially Barbara, who, a week after the funeral, announced that maybe she would kill herself as well.

None of us reminded her that Monica had died of a terminal illness, as, in a way, that didn’t matter anymore. The point was that she was gone, and our lives would never be the same: we were people who knew people who died. This is to say that we had been touched by tragedy, and had been made special by it. By all appearances, I was devastated, but in fact I had never been so happy in my life.

The next time someone died, it was a true friend, a young woman named Dana, who was hit by a car during our first year of college. My grief was genuine, yet still, no matter how hard I fought, there was an element of showmanship to it, the hope that someone might say, “You look like you just lost your best friend.”

Then I could say, “As a matter of fact, I did,” my voice cracked and anguished.

It was as if I’d learned to grieve by watching television: here you cry, here you throw yourself upon the bed, here you look in the mirror and notice how good you look with a tear-stained face.

I’ve never really been "touched by tragedy" — I wonder if I’ll respond like they do in the movies.

His other great anecdote is about how people boarding coach on an airplane always check out who’s in business and first class, and are always disappointed:

“May I bring you a drink to go with those warm nuts, Mr. Sedaris?” the woman looking after me asked—this as the people in coach were still boarding. The looks they gave me as they passed were the looks I give when the door of a limousine opens. You always expect to see a movie star, or, at the very least, someone better dressed than you, but time and time again it’s just a sloppy nobody. Thus the look, which translates to “Fuck you, Sloppy Nobody, for making me turn my head.”

Tyler Cowen on travel:

My main tip is simply: "Go, go go!" Go. People have a status quo bias when they make decisions and they don’t take enough chances. My colleague and co-blogger Alex Tabarrok makes an interesting point. If you knew your life were much shorter you would travel to those places you always wanted to see. If you knew your life were to be much longer you would have more time to travel; again you would travel more. So, are you trying to tell me that your expected lifespan is just at that length where you shouldn’t travel more? I don’t buy it.

The "go, go, go" advice applies to most things, I think, not just travel. Just do it.

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The above link is at Gadling.com, a travel web site I hadn’t seen before. Some good stuff. Here’s a funny YouTube video about a Philadelphia Phillies baseball player having a prank played on him — his manager and agent tell him he’s been traded to Japan.